Dallas Theological Seminary

How congruence between ad and landing page affects conversion

Experiment ID: #4854

Dallas Theological Seminary

The DTS mission is, “to glorify God by equipping godly servant-leaders for the proclamation of His Word and the building up of the body of Christ worldwide.” They strive to help men and women fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, or more simply: Teach Truth. Love Well.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 07/01/2016 - 08/29/2016

Dallas Theological Seminary was promoting their second course, Genesis, on Facebook. They wanted to emphasize the academic nature of the course, so they launched ads that showed a person taking the course while studying. But they hypothesized that they might be able to increase conversion by employing the principle known as congruency: aligning each element of a marketing funnel to increase response.

They pulled the image of the Sistine Chapel from the landing page and put it into the ad, and launched an A/B test to see if they were able to affect conversion.

Research Question

Will increasing congruence affect course signup rate?

Design

C: Control
T1: Treatment 1

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Control 0.49%
T1: Treatment 1 0.73%47.6% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 9,488 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 239,607, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.

Flux Metrics Affected

The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:

    0% increase in traffic
× 47.6% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The new ad that used the same imagery as the landing page increased conversion by 47.6%. This shows that congruence is a powerful, if often subliminal tool. While the ad image might not be something that the visitor actively thinks about, the repetition of the imagery throughout the funnel reminds them subconsciously that the elements are all linked.


Experiment Documented by Jeff Giddens
Jeff Giddens is President of NextAfter.

Question about experiment #4854

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.